David Bohan: Marketers are up to their eyeballs in data, reports

Aug. 4, 2013

Written by

David Bohan

For The Tennessean

Considering all of this year’s rain, there’s new appreciation for the phrase, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”

Marketers often feel that way about data and reports. They feel as if they’re drowning.

In fact, fewer than half the company officials in one study believe they have a clear understanding of customers’ tastes and needs, according to Economist Intelligence, a forecasting unit of The Economist magazine.

Just last week, I reviewed reports that revealed the following data about Americans from multiple sources:

• Only 4 percent of families are considered “traditional” today, meaning fathers who work away from home, mothers who stay at home and kids in the household.

• The number of mothers in the workforce jumped from 37 percent in 1968 to 65 percent in 2011.

• Women are the sole or main breadwinners in about 40 percent of U.S. households.

• Forty percent of all children are born to single moms.

• Fifty-one percent of adults are married, compared with 72 percent in 1970.

I could go on and on. So how do marketers sift through all the facts and numbers to get sound information that will help them make decisions?

The first step is admitting that you really cannot appeal to a truly mass market. I will never forget asking a client early in my career to define his best prospects. He said without hesitation, “Anyone with $400 left on their Visa credit limit.”

I laughed. He didn’t.

Before my agency starts work on a plan, our job is to understand who the real customers are and to find patterns in the data. Is it geographic? Do all your customers live within a certain trading area? If so, then truly understand the composition of your market.

The number of households, composition of those households, income, education and life stage are all important for understanding your potential customers.

Does your customer base coalesce around an activity?

If you own a camping store, obviously you are not interested in people who vacation only in hotels, but what are the distinct niches within your customer base? Tent campers are different from RV owners, not just in life stage and income, but also in why they are passionate about their recreation time.

Here is an example of information available about American pet owners: Packaged Facts, which publishes market studies about consumer products, recently released its Pet Owner Outlook. This year, spending in the U.S. pet market will reach $62 billion. OK, what does that mean to you as a single retail operator in Nashville?

One approach might be to take the population for your trade area and determine what percentage that represents to the total population to get your potential market volume. That’s a simple math problem.

However, by digging into the data, good information emerges.

According to Packaged Facts research director David Sprinkle, half of the adults in their 20s have a dog in the household, up from only a third a decade ago.

So, if your customer base is over 30, you now know the target audience you need to pursue to increase sales.

Happy digging, and remember to keep your head above water.

David Bohan founded Bohan Advertising in 1990. He has worked in marketing and advertising since earning a degree at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 1970.